Pride and Ambition Theme Analysis

Pinkie and Ida might seem, at first glance, to be foils. Pinkie is a criminal and a Catholic, Ida an upstanding member of the community who puts more stock in superstition and the Ouija board than she does in God-given grace or the possibility of eternal damnation. The two are intimately connected, though, by the pride they take in their own accomplishments and the craven nature of their individual ambition.

Pinkie takes pride in the fact that he has managed at such a young age to leave behind his past as a poverty-stricken street kid to become the head of a successful crime syndicate. However, his ambitions get in the way of his finding true happiness, which, Greene makes clear, might have been possible with Rose if Pinkie could only have set aside his pride and need to rise for long enough to honor Rose’s love and its healing power.  Pinkie’s pride in his own cleverness blinds him to the fact that Rose knew all along that he was behind Hale’s killing; she just didn’t care.

What Pinkie wants most is to be another Mr. Colleoni. While on the cliff near Peacehaven with Rose, “his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that he wasn’t deceived, that he wasn’t going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children. He was going to be where Colleoni was and higher…”

Colleoni, though, is older, richer, and immeasurably more powerful than Pinkie. From his luxurious room in the Cosmopolitan, Colleoni acts like a man who owns the visible world, and he does. The police are on his side. The inspector even suggests to Pinkie that he get out of organized crime and leave what’s left of the business to Colleoni. Pinkie, of course, bristles at such a suggestion. He is willing to kill and keep killing to avoid the appearance of mediocrity.

Ida, meanwhile, defies the contempt of the police and the weak protestations of Phil Corkery to let the matter of Hale’s murder drop because she thinks she is uniquely qualified to bring Pinkie and his gang to justice.  Half-drunk for the bulk of the novel, Ida plunges forward with her investigation into Hale’s death, convinced that whatever she does is beyond reproach because it is in the pursuit of right. She knows nothing of Kite’s death or the tension between Colleoni’s gang and Pinkie’s. She simply trusts her own instincts, because, as Greene writes, “The world was a good place if you didn’t weaken. She was like the chariot in a triumph—behind her were all the big battalions—right’s right, an eye for an eye, when you want to do a thing well, do it yourself.”

She rationalizes her monomania because it allows her to “save” Rose, but Rose does not want to be saved, especially not by a woman like Ida, who Rose describes as too ignorant and unkind to be damned. Even Ida’s friend Clarence calls her “a terrible woman” for all her efforts in the Hale affair.

As the novel comes to a close, Ida congratulates herself on solving a crime that stumped police and snowed the public. She announces to her friends at Henekey’s bar that she has also delivered Rose safely into the bosom of her family. The irony is rich here. If it weren’t for Ida’s relentless hounding of Pinkie, the bloodshed might have ended with Hale, and Spicer and Pinkie might still be alive. Additionally, Rose despises her parents. Home is the last place she would want to be.

Greene suggests that it was pride that doomed Charles Hale, the catalyst of all the violence and heart ache that follows. Hale took a great deal of pride in his job at the Messenger and the hard work it took to climb the ladder from lowly paper seller to reporter. It was in his capacity as a reporter that he became involved with Kite and, in exposing Kite’s illegal activities, got Kite killed and set Pinkie on Hale’s trail. “He was damned, [Hale] told himself with the temporary courage of another whisky, if he’d let that mob frighten him into spoiling his job. What could they do while he had people round him? They hadn’t the nerve to kill him in broad day before witnesses; he was safe with the fifty thousand visitors.” They do have the nerve, of course, although they kill him discreetly in a candy shop under the pier.

The sin of pride sets the violent events of the novel in action and it brings them to just as violent of a close. Pinkie’s need to advance in the mob makes it impossible for him to grasp his only chance at real happiness and fulfillment with Rose, and Ida’s misplaced confidence in her own abilities as a sleuth results not in justice but in tragedy.